gen x

The Unbelievable Truth (1989)

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Hal Hartley’s The Unbelievable Truth is an interesting picture. Robert Burke plays Josh Hutton, a man who returns to his hometown after serving a prison sentence. The truth of what actually happened in the past is something that the film builds to while we in the audience hear various different versions of events passed around as gossip, but all retellings place the blame on Josh for the deaths of his girlfriend and her father. Said deceased are survived only by a young woman named Pearl (Julia McNeal), who works as a waitress in a diner alongside Jane (Edie Falco). Pearl is friends with our other lead, Audry (frequent Hartley collaborator Adrienne Shelly), a high school senior full of relatable angst about the presumed imminent end of the world in nuclear fire; as she says, “the human race never invented anything that it didn’t use.” This existential dread is a counterpoint to the Gen-X apathy of her peers, other than Pearl, whose own childhood tragedies have given her a resilience that tempers her. Josh reappears in town and quickly gets a job working for Audry’s mechanic father Vic (Christopher Cooke), who is frequently at odds with his daughter about her plans for the future. She’s been accepted to Harvard, but she and Vic constantly bargain over whether she will attend that university or the local community college, or if she will study literature or broadcasting, and what promises Vic has to make in order to get her to compromise. 

Audry and Josh meet and there is an immediate connection. Both are separated from the community around them, with her as the philosophically inclined old soul and him as the misunderstood loner with a troubled past who loves reading about history. At her graduation party, Vic is talked into paying for a portfolio of photographs for Audry by an agent, and although this initially seems to be nothing but a con, Audry finds work quickly and often. She’s upset that Josh didn’t come to the party, but she and Pearl spend some time together and Pearl admits that she thinks Josh is a nice man despite her family’s history with him and gives Audry the go-ahead to pursue him. Josh, for his part, lives ascetically, dressing all in black like Johnny Cash when he’s not in his mechanic overalls, living in his father’s abandoned house, and abstaining from drinking. This results in him being compared to a member of the cloth multiple times, as his celibacy prompts fellow mechanic Mike (Mark Bailey) to ask him, aghast, “like a priest?” and still later, when Josh asks that Audry not call him “Mr. Hutton,” she counters that she feels like she should call him “Reverend.” Vic isn’t happy to learn about this budding romance and forbids the two from seeing each other, once again bargaining with her about her future and what he’s willing to pay for and what he expects in return (namely that she’ll proceed to go to college as promised after her modeling gap year, and in return he won’t fire Josh). When Audry ends up in a jewelry ad that features her in the nude, Vic is convinced by Mike that Josh is reliable, and thus sends him into the city to bring Audry home. 

Released in 1989, The Unbelievable Truth reminds one in some ways of another alliteratively named director’s teenage romance angst film, Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything. Our main character is an oddball, like Lloyd Dobbler, except this time she’s a teenage girl, and what isolates her from her peer group is her resignation to her absolute faith that the apocalypse draws nigh. She’s precocious and bright, but her certainty about the uncertainty of the future means that the moment that she’s given the chance to live in the moment by making decent money as a model, she gets distracted from all of the gloom and doom; this is epitomized when she tells Pearl that she doesn’t even keep up with the news anymore. She’s the one who pursues Josh, not the other way around, and he really only seems to entertain the idea of entering into something romantic with her once she’s matured from experiencing more of the world outside of the suburbs that she’s always known. It’s unclear just how old Josh is, but Burke manages a way to convey both a world-weariness from his time in prison as well as a kind of innocence that he’s managed to maintain a hold on. Audry’s mother tells her a version of the story of Josh’s guilt and when Audry questions it, she says that the girl was too young to remember, but other dialogue implies that Audry was an infant at the time. One gets the feeling that more attention was paid to imagery than to those little details (or the dialogue for that matter). 

Another film that this one draws to mind is the 1990s Winona Ryder vehicle Reality Bites, as few other films lean so hard into Gen-X disaffection. The problem is that, when viewed by a modern audience, Reality Bites presents a main couple who both struggle with “selling out” into a lifestyle that is very appealing to anyone of the same age as the characters in every generation since. As Lindsay Ellis put it in one of her video essays years ago, everything is so much worse now, and, in the time since that essay’s release, there has been no further improvement in, uh, anything. Somehow, despite having the same sort of spoiled-for-choice opportunities, Audry remains likable and grounded, and we empathize with her early adulthood ennui and the altering states of being (a) panicked about preparing for a future and (b) resigned to the fact that there is no future. It may just be that Shelly is simply that likeable, like Lloyd Dobler and his boombox. 

Stylistically, there’s fun being had here. Having watched several of Hartley’s short films prior to sitting down to this one, I think I was prepared for this to be a film that would, in a scene in which Audry and Josh discuss their passions, be more focused on the images on screen than the dialogue. There are some great performances in scenes between the two, but they appear so sporadically, sprinkled in among scenes where the two monologue at each other with snippets of poetic-sounding but meaningless phrases. Half of these exist in order to provide a reason for some tableau that Hartley has created rather than because they provide further insight into character. This is a mixed bag. But Burke and Shelly sell it, even when it shouldn’t work, and that can also be owed to the presence of the mystery of Josh’s past helps keep the gears moving even when things start to feel like they’re running in place. 

Although nothing in the film made me laugh out loud, it has a decent sense of humor. Much of the repartee is pretty good, and it works with these actors. Cooke’s performance as Vic and all the ways that he deludes himself or gets talked into things make him more fun than his curmudgeonly nature would imply. There’s also a pretty good recurring bit where Audry’s ex-boyfriend Emmet (Gary Sauer) keeps physically attacking every man that he sees in Audry’s proximity, as he can’t believe that she would leave him for any other reason than that there is another man. There are interstitials to represent time passing (“A month, maybe two months later”) and as an interjection (“also,” “but”) which feel just irreverent enough for an indie like this. A lot of the jokes read as if they would come off a little too campy if the film weren’t taking itself mostly seriously. For example: 

Audry: Did you make love to Josh?”
Pearl: No, did you?
Audry: No.
Pearl: Why not?
Audry: I just got here.

On the page, there’s something about that which reads like a joke from Clue, but it’s delivered here in a way that elicits a smile but not quite a laugh. Perhaps the best bit, however, occurs when everyone converges on Josh’s house in the finale for various different reasons, converting the film into a bit of a farce for a while. Pearl has information that could help Josh, Audry has realized that Josh came to New York to look for her and has the wrong idea about her living situation, Vic seeks to confirm that Josh was able to get her back, and Mike is looking for Pearl. It’s fun, and the wrap-up from there is sweet. 

I’m not sure that I would recommend this to everyone. The back-and-forth can run on quite a bit sometimes, but it ultimately averages out to be a very lovely movie that will sit on a shelf in your mind and give you warm feelings for a long time to come. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Reality Bites (1994)

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If there’s any one clear enemy that Gen-X kids rallied against in the 90s it was “Phoniness.” It was as if the entire Slacker generation had taken Holden Caulfield’s tirades against “phonies” as gospel instead of mocking the blowhard for his own vapid narcissism, creating a kind of low-effort religious movement that worshipped Authenticity as the main driver of counterculture. Any artist in search of a self-sustaining paycheck was labeled a sell-out. Any bozo who debased themselves by wearing a suit was a corporate clown. Anyone caught caring especially deeply on any topic at all was a sucker & a loser, at least in the eyes of Generation Apathy. That anti-phonies mindset made Gen-X especially difficult to pander to as a movie-going audience, since any studio actually caught putting an effort into marketing to that demographic had already committed their intended audience’s cardinal sin: putting effort into anything at all. So, the few times that Hollywood did openly pander to Gen-X sensibilities mostly produced flops – both critically & financially. While “indie cinema” flourished, Slacker Era studio pictures like Empire Records, Airheads, and Reality Bites were slapped aside as phonies by the Gen-X audience they were actually aimed at, only to gradually gain cult status among younger viewers who foolishly looked up to that generation as The Cool Kids.

Speaking as a foolish Millennial myself, I’m highly susceptible to being charmed by these big-studio attempts at X-tremely 90s Gen-X pandering, which is why I recently gave Reality Bites a shot despite its contemporary critical dismissal. It’s easy to see why this film in particular was such a target for claims of corporate phoniness, while goofier titles like Empire Records & Airheads were merely forgotten as trivialities. It’s just so achingly sincere as a romantic comedy in a way that just does not jive at all with Gen-X apathy politics. Reality Bites tries to have it both ways in “giving voice” to a generation that only wants to eat pizza, watch syndicated television, and smoke weed out of half-crushed soda cans while also committing wholeheartedly to a traditional romantic triangle plot. Because all three participants in that central melodrama are such Apathetic brats, it’s difficult to care at all about who ends up with whom as the story shakes out, which I’m saying even as a product of the Radical Empathy generation that eagerly followed in the Slackers’ footsteps. Reality Bites is terminally phony, but only because it can’t find a proper way to marry genuine heartfelt emotion with the who-cares slackerdom of its target demographic. In the attempt, it amounts to nothing at all, just wasted time.

The one saving grace of this big-studio Slacker facsimile is the charm of its Ultra 90s cast. If nothing else, Winona Ryder is always some baseline level of delightful, apparently even as a privileged brat with no sense of morals, goals, or an internal life. Jeanine Garofalo & Steve Zahn are likewise adorably chummy as her pizza-loving, couch-dwelling roommates, so much so that you wish the movie were solely about that trio’s friendship so you could spend more time in their smoky living room with them, just hanging out. Instead, the film details a romantic rivalry in which a greasy go-nowhere musician (Ethan Hawke) and a yuppie corporate stooge (Ben Stiller) play tug of war with Ryder’s confused heart – a literalized conflict between Authenticity & Phoniness. I’ll spare you the reveal of which undeserving beau she chooses in this review, but know this: the movie would have been vastly improved if it didn’t care about that romantic conflict at all. Reality Bites pretends to be interested in the static ennui of a generation with no sense of ambition or enthusiasm for participating in established social norms, but it quickly bails on that inert navel-gazing to instead dive headfirst into the normiest bullshit I can possibly think of: a potentially flourishing young woman wasting her time on two bonehead men who don’t deserve a second’s pause.

Directed by Ben Stiller around the time when he was producing much more successful Gen-X comedy with The Ben Stiller Show, Reality Bites does make some admirable motions towards actively mocking its own Slacker sensibilities instead of merely pandering to them. Stiller was genius to cast himself as the nexus of this sarcastic, self-effacing humor. As a suited network exec for an MTV-parodying cable channel called In Your Face Television, Stiller positions himself as a money-grubbing goon who literally peddles youth counterculture for cheap payouts. Ryder’s character is an amateur documentarian who interviews her immediate social circle about their post-college ennui as a self-satisfying art project, which Stiller turns around to sell to his network as a slapstick comedy mutation of The Real World. This line of generational parody brilliantly goes one level deeper in the end credits, when Stiller’s network exec bozo turns the love triangle drama that drives the film into a scripted Gen-X soap opera. If Reality Bites were ever going to speak directly to its intended audience, this self-parody would have to have been way more pronounced & exaggerated to mean much of anything. As is, it takes the romantic lives of the privileged brats it lightly ribs very seriously, so unfortunately all that registers is its tragic phoniness as a corporate product.

Aesthetics-wise, there’s a lot to admire here. The film’s soundtrack is peppered with some pure 90s car-cassette gems, including the 5-star Lisa Loeb classic “Stay,” which it popularized with a tie-in music video (sadly, a dead artform). Ryder & Garofalo’s costuming is distinctly College Grad 90s chic, which is a pleasure in itself. However, the movie’s strongest asset is its VHS camcorder-style cinematography meant to mimic Ryder’s D.I.Y. documentary project, a vivid visual texture achieved by a young Emmanuel Lubezki of all people. The thing is, though, that you can get those same camcorder vibes from Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape without having to hang out with total dipshits for 100 minutes. Nothing is good enough to survive the contrived, dispiriting dirge of this film’s love triangle conflict: not Lubezki’s spectacularly Authentic camerawork, not Stiller’s astute Gen-X self-parody, not even Ryder’s consistently stellar on-screen charm. Reality Bites isn’t a total waste of time, but it’s also not much of anything at all. It’s ultimately stuck between two disparate sensibilities—the romantic & the apathetic—and thus ultimately panders to no one. This is one of those cases where the Gen-X kids were right to shrug it off, of which there are many since their collective impulse was to immediately shrug off Everything.

-Brandon Ledet